Your weekly playlist news update [18 April 2018]

According to Variety, Spotify has recently poached Carl Chery, Apple Music’s Head of Artist Curation for hip-hop and R&B programming. Chery is best known for securing Apple Music exclusives from Chance the Rapper, including the Grammy-winning album Coloring Book.

Pandora has taken on rivals Spotify with the launch of their own take on personalization with dozens of playlists built to fit users’ moods, activities, and genres, which are all powered by Pandora’s Music Genome. “We’ve been building out, for many years, a collection of well over 75 machine learning algorithms and techniques to help drive content discovery and delivery,” explains Chris Phillips, Pandora’s Chief Product Officer, of the personalization technology. “What we’re doing is what we believe is the bleeding edge of deep learning algorithms,” he says.

An announcement is expected from Spotify on the development of a new version of its free music service, according to Bloomberg. With the updated service, free mobile listeners will be able to access playlists more quickly and have more control over what songs they hear on top playlists, mimicking Spotify’s ad-free subscription product.

Spotify has added a new feature that will make it easier for artists to direct listeners to their social media pages. The ‘Spotify For Artists’ platform will now allow users to add social media links such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Wikipedia to the ‘About’ tab on their profile.

In an interview with Billboard, Amazon Music VP Steve Boom says that it has “tens of millions” of paid customers, with Amazon Music Unlimited subscriptions having more than doubled in the past six months. Boom says that the growth in the adoption of smart speakers like Amazon’s Echo has unlocked a new, untapped demographic of streamers, which is where Amazon has seen most of its new paid subscribers come from.